Month: November 2001

Sacred Ground

Eagle Creek trail in the Columbia River Gorge, just outside of Portland, Oregon, seems like sacred ground to me, not because it has any particular religious significance but because it has become a part of me.

This is a beautiful trail, and I’m sure that it was the beauty that attracted me to the area the first few times I hiked there. Now, however, it is far more than the beauty that attracts me. Visiting Eagle Creek is like returning home every Thanksgiving. My year isnât complete without hiking Eagle Creek at least once, and preferably early in the year.

I have hiked this trail more than any other trail in the last thirty five years, often two or three times a year, and yet I never tire of it. It is one of the first trails to open in the spring because it is relatively low and flat, and in the summer the high walls and swift-flowing creek provide natural air conditioning, making it the best place around here to hike when itâs hot. I have many fond memories of hikes here, including the only overnight trip our high school hiking club took before it was disbanded because of insurance worries.

Perhaps it is so special, though, because it is also the first trail I ever took a solo backpacking trip with my two children. It turned out to be a memorable trip, for many reasons. Itâs infamous, though, because itâs the trip where my daughter invented the oft-repeated line, ãDad, youâre trying to kill us!ä

The first day was the part of the trip I was most worried about, and I nagged the two constantly to keep a hand on the cable railing used to reassure those who donât feel comfortable looking at 700 foot straight drop off, and it reassured me even if it didnât reassure them. Needless to say, the day went perfectly, and the two kids saw dad as a needless worrywart.

On the second day of the hike we ran into a serious tree blow down and spent hours climbing over and under fallen trees, something I hadnât anticipated on the usually well-maintained Pacific Crest Trail. The complaints began.

The next morning we were awakened by the eerie call of a loon (which wouldnât have been nearly as eerie if I had known what it was). I made the mistake of suggesting the lake was probably haunted. Not a good idea. The day got steadily worse after that. Although the guidebook I had relied on for directions clearly indicated a round trip loop, it was obviously seldom used as it kept disappearing and reappearing after a short distance. It was as difficult to follow as some I had followed in the jungles of Vietnam. The complaints became louder.

Once we broke into a clearing high on the cliffs and could see that it was downhill the rest of the way, our mood shifted. My daughter started singing and skipping along. Suddenly her feet slipped on the wet beargrass and shot 10 feet down the hill. Another 10 feet and she would have dropped out of sight, permanently. My knees went rubbery, and I yelled at her not to move until I could get my pack off. No chance, she was scrambling uphill as fast as she could and reached the trail before I could get even get my pack off. The kids were soon ready to go, but my knees were so weak that I had to sit there another twenty minutes before I could go on.

The trail the rest of the way was as steep as any I have ever experienced, and I cursed the idiot who had written the hiking book suggesting this as a round trip. A lot more complaints.

Needless to say, we survived the hike, though Iâm not sure what the children told their mother when I took them home. We’ve never really discussed that hike since, though the phrase "Dad, you’re trying to kill us" has returned as reminder of the trip.

Surprisingly, though, after my daughter was married and came for a visit with her new husband, this was the first trail that she wanted to day-hike.

And, later, when she invited me on a hike with her and her husband, the trail she chose was probably the most challenging of my life÷I thought she was trying to kill me.

A War Against Earth

Gary Snyder reminds me more of Edward Abbey than any poet. His poems look at nature, and at life, from radically diverse perspectives. In his preface to No Nature he says, "There is no single or set "nature, either as ‘natural world’ or the ‘nature of things.’ The greatest respect we can pay to nature is not to trap it, but to acknowledge that it eludes us and that our own nature is also fluid, open, and conditional."

Snyder studied Zen at a monastery in Kyoto and Tibetan Buddhism and that is reflected in his poems, but you are also likely to find the loggers attitude reflected in them. His poem entitled "Why Log Truck Drivers Rise Earlier than Students of "Zen." though written in the simple language of a tanka or haiku, celebrates the "polished" "hubs" and "shiny" diesel "stack" of the logging truck, and ends with the simple declaration "There" is no other "life" That simple declaration could easily be made by either a truck driver or a Zen student.

"Call of the Wild" probably isn’t a typical Snyder poem, but it does contain several reoccurring themes. Like most of his poems, it is pro-environmental, and it’s not unusual for him to use native Indian themes. His poems often have a nice sense of humor, which certainly dominates this poem.

The Call Of The Wild

The heavy old man in his bed at night
Hears the Coyote singing
in the back meadow.
All the years he ranched and mined and logged.
A Catholic.
A native Californian.
and the Coyotes howl in his
Eightieth year.
He will call the Government
Trapper
Who uses iron leg-traps on Coyotes,
Tomorrow.
My sons will lose this
Music they have just started
To love.

The ex acid-heads from the cities
Converted to Guru or Swami,
Do penance with shiny
Dopey eyes, and quit eating meat.
In the forests of North America,
The land of Coyote and Eagle,
They dream of India, of
forever blissful sexless highs,
And sleep in oil-heated
Geodesic domes, that
Were stuck like warts
In the woods.

And the Coyote singing
is shut away
for they fear
the call
of the wild.

And they sold their virgin cedar trees,
the tallest trees in miles,
To a logger
Who told them,

"Trees are full of bugs."

The Government finally decided
To wage the war all-out. Defeat
is Un-American.

And they took to the air,
Their women beside them
in bouffant hairdos
putting nail-polish on the
gunship cannon-buttons.

And they never came down,
for they found,
the ground

is pro-Communist. And dirty.
And the insects side with the Viet Cong.

So they bomb and they bomb
Day after day, across the planet
blinding sparrows
breaking the ear-drums of owls
splintering trunks of cherries
twining and looping
deer intestines
in the shaken, dusty, rocks.

All these Americans up in special cities in the sky
Dumping poisons and explosives
Across Asia first,
And next North America,

A war against earth.
When it’s done there’ll be
no place

A Coyote could hide.

envoy

I would like to say
Coyote is forever
Inside you.

But it’s not true.

The Republican in the poem seems pretty predictable, almost stereotypical, but the ironic portrayal of the ex acid-heads and their ignorance of the natural world they claim to be concerned about makes us wonder if anyone in America really cares about "the" "wild" Do Americans all want nature to reflect our reality. Do we all want to remake the world in our own image rather than accept it for what it is?

The lines "And the insects side with the Viet Cong./So they bomb and they bomb" recall the American use of defoliants in Viet Nam to deny the North Vietnamese the ability to deliver arms to the Viet Cong. Unfortunately, in the process all the animals that depended on the jungle were destroyed, and the area still "hasn’t" healed. But, hey, it is war.

In a very real sense, America seems to have declared war on the earth, "Dumping poisons and explosives" on the entire environment in order to remake it into our image of what it should be like and to serve our own purposes. It should be "bug free" and wild animals should be like the wild animals in Disney’s movies, or, at the very least, kept out of our sight.

Snyder, like Abbey, seems to feel that the loss of nature will necessarily bring with it the loss of "coyote," that special spirit inside of us that can only come from our exposure to the real "wild."

Unlike Abbey, though, Snyder is able to view America’s attempts to destroy the environment from a distance, to somehow find ironic humor in these actions. Perhaps it is absurdist humor, but laughing is better than crying, particularly when crying won’t change the situation.

Open Directory – Arts: Literature: Authors: S: Snyder, Gary

An International Community

Blogging has reawakened my interest in the internet.

After years of using the internet, I had begun to feel that it, like much of everything else in our society, had been taken over by commercial interests. While I enjoyed the convenience and savings of ordering software and hardware for my Macintosh from the net, I wasn’t willing to pay $40 a month for the convenience.

Even when I did find articles on the web, they were often useless, either little more than encyclopedia articles or written with an obvious bias.

Personally, I found it more and more difficult to find intellectually stimulating ideas on the web. Either I didn’t know how to find them, or I was unwilling to wade through the tons of pages looking for relevant material.

Since finding blogs several months ago, though, I have a renewed interest in the internet. First, as mentioned in an earlier blog, I found some great sources of articles on the web and I didn’t have to spend hours doing it. Some of those sites are found in my links section, but I still rely daily on wood s lot.

More recently, I found several personal, philosophical sites that are close to my own personal philosophy, yet with a different enough perspective that I use them to inspire and to help refine my own thinking, sites like Cloud 9 , The Obvious? and whiskey river. I’ve even enjoyed briefly exchanging emails with some of them, but more importantly than that, I feel like there is another community, an international one at that, that I am a part of and that inspires me to focus my ideas and put them down on the page.

This community may not offer the kind of feedback that a personal dialogue does, but, at its best, it reminds me of an international university where ideas are shared among colleagues.

Desert Solitaire Part III

Despite any philosophical differences I may have with Abbey, he articulates some of my feelings so precisely it makes me wonder if he hasn’t been listening to my conversations with my hiking partner. Perhaps, though, they are merely universal feelings shared by most dedicated hikers.

Standing alone on the top of a mountain looking down at the miles and miles of clearcuts, it’s hard not to agree with Abbey when he says:

But the love of wilderness is more than a hunger for what is always beyond reach; it is also an expression of loyalty to the earth, the earth which bore us and sustains us, the only home we shall ever know, the only paradise we ever need-if only we had the eyes to see. Original sin, the true original sin, is the blind destruction for the sake of greed of this natural paradise which lies all around us-if only we were worthy of it.

The best way to recruit newcomers to the environmental movement is to get them out to truly experience the wilderness, to see nature first-hand, and then to have them compare it to a recent clear-cut.

It’s difficult for a lover of wilderness to go to a National Park and sense that Abbey is not absolutely right on when he says:

A man on foot, on horseback or on a bicycle will see more, feel more, enjoy more in one mile than the motorized tourists can in a hundred miles. Better to idle through one park in two weeks than try to race through a dozen in the same amount of time. Flatlanders! Seeing the wonders of the world from behind the driver’s wheel is little different than experiencing them in a theater or through a web page.

Nor is virtual reality a substitute for real experience. It seems a little ironic for a writer of so many books about the environment to say it, but Abbey also seems right on when he says:

Through naming comes knowing; we grasp an object, mentally, by giving it a name comprehension, prehension, apprehension. And thus through language create a whole world, corresponding to the other world out there. Or we trust that it corresponds. Or perhaps, like a German poet, we cease to care, becoming more concerned with the naming than with the things named; the former becomes more real than the latter. And so in the end the world is lost again. No, the world remains those unique, particular, incorrigibly individual junipers and sandstone +monoliths-and it is we who are lost. Again. Round and round, through the endless labyrinth of thought-the maze.

If it came right down to it, I would trade all of the hiking books I own for one more week of hiking. On the other hand, I have more hiking books than I would ever be willing to carry on a hike. You have to do something when it’s raining, even if it is only dream.

Finally, Abbey offers the ultimate argument against those who argue that environmentalists are elitists and are only worried about preserving wildernesses and not about the workers who depend on the forests for their livelihood:

The finest quality of this stone, these plants and animals, this desert landscape is the indifference manifest to our presence, our absence, our coming, our staying or our going. Whether we live or die is a matter of absolutely no concern whatsoever to the desert. Let men in their madness blast every city on earth into black rubble and envelop the entire planet in a cloud of lethal gas-the canyons and hills, the springs and rocks will still be here, the sunlight will filter through, water will form and warmth shall be upon the land and after sufficient time, no matter how long, somewhere, living things will emerge and join and stand once again, this time perhaps to take a different and better course.

Only a fool believes that mankind has the power to destroy the earth. What really concerns environmentalists is that people will, in their ignorance, destroy the ecosystem that supports them, that the human race will no longer be here to experience the profound, eternal beauty of earth.

Looking for more? Here’s an interesting essay on Abbey by an important environmental writer: A FEW WORDS IN FAVOR OF EDWARD ABBEY